Boys Whose Favorite Color is Pink

J. Crew customers received an ad last week featuring creative director Jenna Lyons, who I wish were my mom, pictured with her son wearing pink nail polish. They are bonding in a moment of extreme joy and, perhaps, identification. The picture is like watching the train of misery and abjection arriving at the little boy's body, dumbfounded by the action and turning right back to wherever it came from. The caption reads "Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon." Now conservative bloggers and even some psychologists are outraged at a picture which apparently announces the end of gender boundaries and, worse, the end of child rearing as life's raison d'être!

In Gawker's report on this we learn that a certain psychologist Keith Ablow, mourns the fact that girls "beat up other girls on YouTube" and "young men primp and preen until their abdomens are washboards and their hair is perfect." He continues: "And while that may seem like no big deal, it will be a very big deal if it turns out that neither gender is very comfortable anymore nurturing children above all else, and neither gender is motivated to rank creating a family above having great sex forever and neither gender is motivated to protect the nation by marching into combat against other men and risking their lives."

Not a surprise that Mr. Ablow has written a book with Glenn Beck and is Fox News' "expert" in psychiatry. The concepts of male identification with female's sartorial artifice developed by Kaja Silverman in "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse" are turned into panicky disavowal here. Being faced with a border whose daily labor is supposed to turn into concrete and yet remains porous, and so unabashedly celebrated like this, is a hard one to take. And it's all very contradicting. The same rhetoric that claims a kind of undeniable ontological and physiological truth to gender also believes that the mere applying of a certain color on a subject's toe will suddenly reverse the course of history? Of course the problem isn't so much the child's predilection for pink, but the mother's approval. The mother, designated to precisely do patriarchy's dirty work of surveillance and hetero-pedagogy is here a traitor.